Notices by Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp), page 3

@dalias If you want a gerontocracy, that's certainly a way to ensure it.

@inthehands David Graber's "BS jobs" should be a high school textbook. Late Stage Capitalism is a religion, and his 2013 artivle was 95 theses nailed to its door.

Especially when you ponder the "real" jobs done entirely in support of BS: top floor of management consultants bringing in money, supported by IT, HR, accounts receivable, payroll, janitors, cafeteria staff, and their managers... And all the jobs with 2 hours of real work a week and 38 looking busy.

The apple people insist it's a superior polished ecosystem, and yet threads of people sharing workarounds for iPhone bugs keep wandering by...

https://toot.mirbsd.org/@mirabilos/statuses/01JE2WE610Q1194DEZSJ7H8PJG

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

@vwampage @exchgr @cstross @jalefkowit Eh, blaming a company and not the people running it is like blaming clothes instead of people.

@RuthMalan This essay was anonymously posted in a pastebin so long ago it got slashdotted back when that meant something. The original has long since gone down, but I mirrored a copy. It's about the loss of institutional memory:

https://landley.net/history/mirror/institutional_memory.html

It was about the same time everybody realized that NASA had lost the plans to the Saturn V rocket.

@dalias @evacide You realize your level of puritanism leaves you zero allies, right?

Just checking...

So putin ran out of all the ammunition Iran and North Korea could sell him, and was reduced to launching a 40 year old cold war ICBM at Ukraine (except probably not because they no longer work) and this is viewed as a sign of _strength_?

If he was crashing passenger airliners into Ukraine's cities A) each one would be significantly cheaper, B) Russia has more of them, C) they were last demonstrated to work this century, D) the people who know how to maintain them didn't all retire 15 years ago.

Protest works. Direct action works. Centrists attempting to muzzle their "allies" are often more damaging than the opposition.

https://fediscience.org/@michcampbell/113519875655455270

@cstross It's an anime called "Gate" from 2017. It's on hulu in the states. Quite good actually, if you don't mind the barely sublimated cultural assertions bobbing just below the surface.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4958580/

@dalias I have no idea why you're arguing that his cold feet excuses about buying the thing were right. Or that he didn't make the place significantly worse.

Researcher concludes at least 1/3 of ex-twitter's remaining traffic is bots disguised as people. (And that's just a lower bound.)

https://youtu.be/GZ5XN_mJE8Y

@dalias @tiffanycli I've watched multiple individual boomers ossify into a loon. Didn't used to be crazy, became crazy.

@dalias @tiffanycli Oh sure. Multiple causes at work here, and "became" is collective not individual.

@tiffanycli Boomers became more conservative as they aged. They also spent 50 years breathing massive quantities of tetraethyl-lead exhaust fumes.

@magnetic_tape @kkarhan @vwestlife @ActionRetro @mos_8502 @OS1337 I really enjoyed Vitaly Wool's talk at ELC 2015. https://elinux.org/images/9/90/Linux_for_Microcontrollers-_From_Marginal_to_Mainstream.pdf

It's a pity the Linux Foundation deleted all the talk videos from that year.

@ekis http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3487.html

I've taken to answering the phone "Potato" instead of "Hello", because a human will go "what?" and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.

This excellent writeup explains Google's explicit decision to destroy search (on February 5th, 2019) using email exhibits from the DOJ antitrust trial they lost:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

tl;dr: Late Stage Capitalism demands "growth" in metrics like "how many searches" and "how long spent on the site", so "get the right answer immediately" was intentionally replaced with "search several times" and "comb through pages of trash".

Well there's a follow-up post now:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/requiem-for-raghavan/

Meanwhile it'll happy trim the sender and subject fields to 3 chars each (BY DEFAULT).

The real problem is the list of email in this folder isn't above the email pane, it's to the side eating horizontal space. I think I want "compact view", but it's greyed out.

The first google hit for "thunderbird compact view greyed out" is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197434 closed TWENTY ONE YEARS AGO.

Why did the implement the ABILITY to grey it out? Why would it EVER be greyed out? What's the POINT of doing that?

People call thunderbird abandonware and I'm going "oh, if only". I WANT IT TO STOP GRATUITOUSLY CHANGING THE UI.

For example: I can't sort by "order received" unless it's visible in table view. (It's greyed out in the pulldown otherwise.) But the minimum size it lets me give the column is enough for 10 digits. I DO NOT CARE about this field, I just don't want new messages scattered back in the history (including one from today claiming to be from 2011).